At St. Mary’s we provide an education of the highest quality to enable every child to realize their potential within a nurturing Christian community. Welcome to St Mary’s Church Of England Primary School. I hope the information contained within this website provides a useful and helpful insight into the life and work of the school. St Mary’s is a one-form entry, Church of England, state-maintained primary school in the heart of Putney. The school has a committed staff team and pupils who want to learn. Both are strongly supported by the governors and the parent body.
Learning and achievement are central to our work. Our philosophy is that all children can be successful learners and that all are capable of achievement. Although we are immensely proud of our academic achievements, our Christian values and ethos are of utmost importance and lie at the heart of everything we do. We gather together for daily worship and the school has strong links with St Mary’s Church.
We support all children to achieve their full potential. We have extremely high expectations of our pupils and we expect the parent body to support us in this. We foster independence and feed their thirst for knowledge. We encourage our pupils to display outstanding discipline and behavior, show respect for everyone and everything and always do and be the best that they can be. Although the school’s last Ofsted was outstanding, we are an improving school. We do not rest on our laurels and we are always looking for opportunities to do what we do even better – if we can.
At St. Mary’s we provide an education of the highest quality to enable every child to realize their potential within a nurturing Christian community. St. Mary’s Church of England Primary School is a welcoming school that inspires learning and achieves academic success. We believe education is about teaching the skills needed to acquire knowledge and understanding while instilling the ability to learn independently. We offer a rich and varied curriculum designed to meet the needs of every child.
Our dedicated staff works hard with all children, irrespective of their starting points. We expect the highest standards of professionalism from staff, investing in training and development to ensure that all have the necessary skills, enabling challenges to be surmounted and learning extended. They treat all children with respect, working towards excellence in all areas of school life. We encourage parents to take an active role in their child’s education and the life of the school. A strong Christian ethos, based on mutual respect and acceptance, enables all families regardless of faith, to thrive within our community.
St. Mary’s provides its pupils with an education that is broad and balanced. We aim to make learning exciting, meaningful, and memorable. Our curriculum promotes the spiritual, moral, social, and cultural development of pupils at our school, as well as preparing them for the responsibilities and experiences of later life.
The EYFS Framework explains how and what your child will be learning. In Nursery and Reception, children learn skills, acquire new knowledge and demonstrate their understanding through 7 areas of learning and development. Children work within the 3 prime areas that are most essential for their healthy development and future learning. These are:
- Communication and language
- Physical development
- Personal, social, and emotional development
As children grow, the prime areas will help them to develop skills in 4 specific areas. These are:
- Literacy
- Mathematics
- Understanding the world
- Expressive arts and design
These 7 areas are used to plan your child’s learning and activities. The staff teaching and supporting your child will make sure that the activities are suited to your child’s unique needs. Children in the EYFS at St. Mary’s will learn by playing and exploring, being active, and through creative and critical thinking which takes place both indoors and outdoors.
St. Mary’s follows the statutory national curriculum which sets out subject content for those subjects that should be taught to all pupils. The overall aim of the national curriculum is to provide pupils with the essential knowledge they need to be educated citizens. Using the national curriculum as a starting point our teachers develop exciting and stimulating lessons to promote the development of pupils’ knowledge, understanding, and skills as part of the wider school curriculum.
Religious Education (RE) is also taught and has an important role in reflecting and conveying the distinctively Christian character of our school. At St. Mary’s we follow a scheme of work for RE provided by the Southwark Diocesan Board of Education (SDBE), which as well as exploring Christianity, also provides the opportunity to study other major world religions.
Parts of our curriculum are taught as discrete subjects and other areas are taught as part of a cross-curricular topic. English, Mathematics, RE, Art and Design, PSHE (and SRE), Modern Foreign Language (MFL), PE, and Music are all generally taught as discrete subjects and identified on class timetables. All the remaining subjects are taught and identified as ‘Topic’ through the ‘International Primary Curriculum’ which is a stimulating topic-based approach to learning. The International Primary Curriculum (IPC) has been designed to provide an exciting and creative curriculum for 3-11-year-olds, with specific learning goals for every subject, international-mindedness, and personal learning.
